A collection drawing on history, memory, and critical analysis that illuminates how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city. In Waldie’s exploration of sprawling Los Angeles, he considers how the city's image was constructed and how it fostered willful amnesia about the city's conflicted past.
From one of our most intrepid and eloquent adventurers of the natural world: an account of her search for home—experiences traveling in Greenland, the North Pole, the Channel Islands of California, Japan; of herding animals in Wyoming and Montana, and her embrace of the balance between the ordinary and celestial.
New York Times reporter Thompson-Hernández tells the compelling story of The Compton Cowboys, a group of African-American men and women who defy stereotypes and continue the proud, centuries-old tradition of black cowboys in the heart of one of America’s most notorious cities.
Morgan Meis begins with a painting of the Greek mythological figure who mentors Dionysus, god of wine and excess, by Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens and spirals out from there, drawing on wells of philosophy, history, and art criticism.
A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and an extended immersion in the city of Arles, showcasing Man Booker International Prize winner Lydia Davis’ sharp literary mind and invaluable insight.
Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 70s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of the 80s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six is a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture.
Writing in the grand American tradition of Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, Donovan Hohn is an “adventurous, inquisitive, and brightly illuminating writer” (New York Times). By turns meditative and comic, adventurous and metaphysical, Hohn writes about the appeal of old tools, the dance between ecology and engineering, and the lost art of ice canoeing.
Poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world, dreaming about a handjob from John Ashbery, swimming next to Nicole Kidman, and reclaiming Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.
In What Is the Grass, Doty―a poet, a gay man, a New Yorker, and an American―keeps company with Whitman and his mutable, landmark work, Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.
Facing his father’s imminent death, and the unresolved conflict between them, Jay Kirk flees on a whirlwind assignment to find a mysterious manuscript in Transylvania before escaping again to the Arctic Circle. A surreal, high-wire act of narrative nonfiction, Avoid the Day is part detective story, part memoir, and part meditation on the value of experience.
